A bounty of 450 (was $100) for rtsx SD card reader driver.

[Jim Thompson]

> On Nov 2, 2019, at 10:51 AM, Ian Lepore <ian at freebsd.org> wrote:
> 
> And just how do you draw the line between "I looked at the linux code as a source of information" and "I copied the linux code in violation of its GPL license" ?

(I am not a lawyer, and if I was, I am not your lawyer...)

If you copy, then you are subject to whatever license you got with the original code. 

One of the normal legal tests (in copyright law, but not, say, patent law) is that what’s in your head is yours. Copyright only covers the expression of an idea in a fixed medium. 

So you can study the code (assuming that you have legal access), gain understanding,  and write your own implementation, using only that understanding.

One of the huge “gotchas” is if copying of non-functional elements of the source code occurs.  These include things like comments, variable names, indentation style, etc. 

To that end, a certain other BSD project once copied unpublished code to a WiFi driver and, “Tada!!” published the result, claiming reverse-engineering. 

Only they even left the comments intact. 

When challenged on this, the other BSD project had the audacity to get SFLC (the people who sue over the GPL)  to step in and say it was all OK.  To be clear, neither the original source, nor the “derived” code was/is GPL licensed. 

One of the best ever FreeBSD Developers now works on Linux full-time in part due to this incident.

And so it goes...

So even if you don’t step on a landmine when copying GPL (or other) code, you might step in s***.  

Best to be careful and keep it clean, right?